Dodge Caravan 2002 Transmission Problem

wrote:

>Actually, I don't believe they were ever what they were once perceived to
>be.
>Through high school and college, I worked weekends and holiday in radio
>and TV repair. CR was a cheerleader for some of the absolute worst
>sets that man has ever put together.

They've always rated according to performance, not reliability, unless
samples failed during testing, so old GEs weren't penalized for their
riveted circuit boards or Zeniths for their bad x-ray safety
capacitors. On the other hand they went from rating Motorola Quasar
highly one year to poorly the next year, and apparently they were right
because for the newer model Motorola issued about 30 design changes,
almost all related to grounding to eliminate power supply interference.

I still have a Sears (Sanyo) TV from the 1970s that was rated highly.
It's needed some new electrolytic capacitors, the wire wraps had to be
soldered, the convergence rings crumbled (I was going to toss it
because of that, but my dog spotted some new ones on the ground during
a walk), and I had to patch holes eroded into the tuner contacts.

>Whether they were actively dishonest, incompetent, or just were looking
>very superficially at the equipment, their advice was pure caca.

Why would they employ so many electrical engineers just for superficial
testing?

wrote:
> Through high school and college, I worked weekends and holiday in radio
> and TV repair. CR was a cheerleader for some of the absolute worst
> sets that man has ever put together.
> Whether they were actively dishonest, incompetent, or just were looking
> very superficially at the equipment, their advice was pure caca.

Late sixties and early seventies, their main criterion for television
quality was pincushion distortion. Minor things like cost of service
and frequency of failure apparently weren't considered.

Nowadays, computer people tend to know what pincushion is. But back then,
I did my own informal surveys. Even when I showed the customers the
pincushion distortion on their own television sets, they couldn't spot it.
So the smart people listened to us and bought Zeniths and hardly ever saw
us again, and the CR faithful ignored us and bought Admiral and Motorola
and saw us about 3 times a year for a couple hundred dollars a year.

On major purchases I'll call a friend who subscribes to CR, and if my
choice of product is high in their list I re-evaluate.

--
If John McCain gets the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination,
my vote for President will be a write-in for Jiang Zemin.